I would like you to defend your claim that PLoS is "crunching" small
publishers. Can you provide an example?
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dr. Vinod Scaria" <drvinod_at_HotPOP.com>
To: <AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG>
Sent: Thursday, October 30, 2003 9:07 AM
Subject: Re: Central vs. Distributed Archives
> CALICUT MEDICAL JOURNAL
> http://www.calicutmedicaljournal.org
> ARCHIVES AT COGPRINTS
> ***************************************************************
>
> As we all know, Open Access Publishing is not gaining the momentum as
> far as Journals published from Developing Countries are concerned [with
> reference to western Journals]. Many reasons can be attributed like:
>
> 1. Monopolistic nature of Open Access Publishers like BioMedCentral
> http://www. biomedcentral.com which pursues the "author pays"
> and would drive away any author from Developing countries. Thus
> obviously publishers from Developing countries would have second
> thoughts before starting one at BMC.
>
> By meaning monopolistic, I refer to the almost complete control over open
> access publishing- say about >75% of open Access Journals in Medicine.and
> Mega organisations like PLOS are crunching the small publishers, as they
> can easily override the smaller ones with the mega funding they have.
> see: http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/326/7392/766#art
>
> 2. As I previously stated in my Editorial in Internet Health-
> www. virtualmed. netfirms. com/internethealth/articleapril03. html ,
> the fear of losing revenue, which are the sole source of sustenance
> of many Journals [though some make a meagre profit].
>
> 3. Lack of sufficient expertise and
> exposure to Open Access Publishing. >>
> www. virtualmed. netfirms. com/internethealth/opinion0303. html
> http://bmj. com/cgi/eletters/326/7382/182/b <<
>
> But recent developments are worth mentioning - at least from India. Online
> Journal of Health and Allied Sciences www. ojhas. org , India's first
> Online BioMedical journal declared a couple of months back that they
> would go Open.
>
> [I am in the Editorial board of OJHAS from Sept 2003]. OJHAS is
> edited and published by a small group of scholars with no external
> support. Everything from Web Design to Editing and Review are done by
> voluntarily by the Editorial team. It also stands as a fine example of
> the fact that Open Access Journals can indeed be successfully organised
> and can indeed survive without an "author pays" model.
>
> Now coming to the Archival, Cogprints was our first choice for many
reasons
>
> 1] It offers interoperability [as mentioned by Harnad]
> 2] It offers unmatched popularity
> 3] It has been there for years and we can be sure of the permanence
> 4] It is of course FREE.
>
> And as Harnad suggested, there is no reason why Journals should not
> be archived at Open Archives, be it self maintained repositories or
> Centralised ones. In fact Open Archiving of electronic journals is
> the need of the hour because our own studies [unpublished] show that
> Electronic journals are just as ephemeral as websites. Scholarly
> communication should never be lost at the cost of copyright
> restrictions. Many of these journals have perhaps done more harm than
> good by locking the access by copyright restrictions.
>
> Moreover, electronic journals are equally vulnerable to the vagaries
> of the Internet. For example, JMIR www. jmir. org went suddenly offline
> some time back [i think it was an year or so] making the whole content
> inaccessible. [But it reappeared later and now is an Open Access Journal].
>
> Thus in short, OPen Archiving of Journals as a whole is perhaps to be
> discussed in a wider perspective than just making it OPEN. The major
> emphasis should be the PERMANENCE of Open Archiving. I hope this post will
> surely trigger a debate on the topic.
>
> Kind regards
>
> Dr. Vinod Scaria
> Executive Editor: Calicut Medical Journal
> Assoc Editor: Online Journal of Health and Allied Sciences
> Editor in Chief: Internet He_at_ lth
>
> WEB: www. drvinod. netfirms. com
> MAIL: vinodscaria_at_yahoo. co. in
> Mobile: +91 98474 65452
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Stevan Harnad
> To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER. SIGMAXI. ORG
> Sent: Wednesday, October 29, 2003 3:38 AM
> Subject: Re: Central vs. Distributed Archives
>
> The two items that follow below are by Vinod Scario from Peter Suber's
> Open Access News http://www. earlham. edu/~peters/fos/fosblog. html
>
> It provides an interesting and inspiring example of the power
> and value of OAI-interoperability http://www. openarchives. org/
> and the interdependence of the two open-access strategies (open-access
> self-archiving and open-access journal publishing) that this new online
> open-access journal, produced in India, is being made accessible
> by archiving it http://calicutmedicaljournal. org/archives. html
> in a specially created sector of CogPrints in the UK,
> http://cogprints. ecs. soton. ac. uk/view/subjects/JOURNALS. html
> a multidisciplinary central archive created in 1997 for author
> self-archiving (which is now being done more via distributed institutional
> eprint archives -- to which the CogPrints software was adapted by Rob
> Tansley, creator of eprints http://software. eprints. org/#ep2 and then
> of dspace http://www. dspace. org/ -- rather than via central ones like
> CogPrints). Yet there is no reason a central archive like CogPrints (or,
> for that matter, any of the distributed institutional archives) cannot
> provide a locus for open-access journals too! OAI-interoperability
> means that they will all be picked up and integrated by cross-archive
> harvesters like OOAster! http://oaister. umdl. umich. edu/o/oaister/
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
Received on Thu Oct 30 2003 - 17:15:44 GMT